An incandescent dance with death

Henning MANKELL is an addictive writer. The author of numerous plays and novels, not least his ensnaring Kurt Wallander mysteries, winner of many awards and twice a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in mystery/thrillers, Mankell is as singular and nonconformist in writing as in life, as idiosyncratic and quite as infuriating as the characters he trots out for our aggravation and delight. Seamlessly translated by Ebba Segerberg, “Before the Frost” displays all aspects of Mankell’s talent for melding the topical and the unpredictable.

Since parent-child relations are in vogue (and the Wallander family exhibits these in collision mode), a crucial thread of the new novel’s action involves one more child looking for a father who cut and ran long ago. That young girl is now a young woman: Anna, a friend of Wallander’s daughter, Linda.

We are, as almost always in Mankell’s whodunits, in Inspector Wallander’s southern Sweden stamping ground: Ystad and environs. Summer wanes in bouts of rain that ebb into mud and fog amid which unexpected horrors burgeon. Birgitta Medberg, an elderly woman who explores and maps country trails, vanishes, and the remains of her butchered body are found in a hidden forest hut. Anna believes she has glimpsed her father on a street in nearby Malmo. Then, Anna also disappears. Linda Wallander, just graduated from the police academy and about to join the Ystad force, frets about her friend. Anna resurfaces after a few days, only to go missing just as mysteriously again.

While Linda hunts for Anna, Wallander and the Ystad police investigate Medberg’s gory death and a string of animal killings -- swans, calves and various pets doused in gasoline and set on fire -- that may connect with it. And the grotesque puzzle grows ever more cockeyed.

Sweden, an older policeman explains to Linda, is awash in lawbreaking and criminality, with the police hardly able to cope: “We’re not in the business of upholding law and order. We’re just trying to keep the spread of lawlessness from getting worse.” He hasn’t visited California.

In Ystad, the lawlessness goes from bad to worse: A religious maniac is at large, driving his acolytes to destruction and self-destruction and planning further mayhem on a grander scale. Eric, the fanatic, survived the Rev. Jim Jones’ suicide execution of 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana, roamed the world after that and has now come home to carry out the will of a ferocious God, according to the Bible as he reads it. Eric’s ravening illogic, involving Anna and others, will drive him to an incandescent end, blowing up a cathedral and killing more innocent people. At least, we hope that it’s his end.

At any rate, “Before the Frost” is about death. The cast of characters dances attendance on it, and the religious maniac leads the deadly dance. It’s hard not to believe that Mankell subliminally suggests that raving Christian fanatics are little different from other murderous and self-murderous bigots. Eric is a prophet, a messenger who believes that he speaks for God, and his message is one of punishment, carnage, havoc. “Beware of false prophets,” intones St. Matthew (7:15), “which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” That may also be the message of Mankell’s mazy, gripping, beautifully orchestrated yarn. *